It's difficult to avoid the subject of death when you're talking to Richard Frankland. It's not as though he's morbid by nature - far from it - but his professional and personal lives have been jammed to bursting point with distressing deaths of Aboriginal people in, and out, of the prison system. So if you talk about his work, the Grim Reaper is always looking over your shoulder.

Frankland is talking quietly, almost matter-of-factly, about his years as an investigator for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody - the experience of which forms the basis for his play, Conversations with the Dead.

Most of the deaths, he says, were due to negligence and stereotyping - such as the assumption that a man was drunk when in fact he was in a diabetic coma, or had suicided when he'd had a heart attack or cerebral haemorrhage. Or the deaths were simply the result of incarcerating people from childhood onwards - "Who can stand to be hemmed in and locked up?"

Frankland reels off names - and stories - of some of the dead: an old soldier, a young dancer, a man whose daughter had changed Frankland's nappies as a baby, a 23-year-old who cut her throat and arms and who died in his arms.

"I wore a suit to Pentridge Hospital to intimidate the prison officers," he recalls. "And then I had a shower with the suit on 'cause her life fluid was all over me."");document.write("

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Not surprisingly, Frankland describes these experiences as "a profound time that changed me and everything around me forever". He was so traumatised that each day was a struggle not to end his own life; he spent the next three years coping with post-traumatic stress disorder. To top it off, his relationship with his partner and children fractured - which also happens to Jack, the character who represents him in the play.

"That's a long and very personal story," he says of the break-up, turning his head aside and looking at the ground. The air is suddenly very still. Even the bickering magpies on the grass nearby fall quiet. For a moment Frankland seems close to tears, then he takes a deep breath and continues.

"I lost them because of the royal commission," he says. "Hugging my kids after I'd seen so much death ... I was too scared to hold them 'cause it would suck the life out of them."

Having said that, Frankland is adamant that the critically acclaimed Conversations with the Dead, which premiered in Melbourne last year, is not about him. It's about those who died: he investigated 99 "accepted" deaths, all of which are in the play in one way or another. The cast also has an "ownership" of the work, he says, from their own families' experiences of death, jail and assimilation.

"Really, it's not a play about me; it's a play about Australia," he says. "Because, if this is happening in our contemporary history ... we've got to ask ourselves: what are we doing? And this is while [non-Aboriginal] people can sit down and eat dinner, a good meal, in the safety of a home, you know? The dichotomy that we exist in, in Australia, is phenomenal."

Frankland can see this dichotomy with a clearer eye than most, thanks to experiences on both sides of the racial fence. He's a multi-award-winning documentary maker (No Way to Forget, Who Killed Malcolm Smith?, Harry's War), a director on Blue Heelers and a former soldier. He is also the son of a white father.

His life changed at the age of six when his father died. There was no longer any "big white protection" and, overnight, his family became a target. His mother, determined to keep her family together, moved regularly - and changed the children's schools - to ensure she stayed a step ahead of officials who would have removed her children.

Frankland says it wasn't until his mid-20s that he learned about the anti-indigenous nature of the pre-1967 constitution and the referendum that year in which Aborigines finally became citizens of their own country. And while he and his siblings had a happy childhood, he still retains an immense feeling of hurt when he remembers seeing his mother and family "being treated like shit".

His experiences as a child, a man and an investigator have made him passionately committed to the rights and protection of children across the globe.

At the end of last year, frustrated by the lack of response in Australia to the violence in Israel, Frankland got on a plane and shot 20 hours of footage of Palestinian families, which he hopes will result in a documentary. "We have professional soldiers killing children, and it's on commercial television, and we sit here and say 'that's bad' and then we go back to drinking our cup of tea.

"The kids I filmed were just kids coming home from school, and they were shot five, six times. The tanks just roll into town and they start shooting people. What type of people are we to let that happen? If we're willing to stand by and let that happen to children around the world, what are we willing to let happen to our own peoples?

"I think it's my job to tell these stories, and it doesn't stop because of heritage or colour, because every kid is the same colour."

The answer in this country? Frankland shrugs. He's not sure. But he knows what he'd like to see: Australia dealing effectively with the dispossession of indigenous people 200 years ago, from the government level down to the family unit.

He asks if I know the name of the indigenous people who lived on the land where I was born. I mention the Eora people, but that's all I know. He says I should teach my children the traditional names of the land, the tribes and their local history, and that all Australians should learn the same thing.

"It's about identity, knowing who we are as a nation," he says. "Until we say it's got to be based on the first peoples, we can't have an identity.

"I think it's also about recognising that [Aboriginal people] are not victims - we're survivors. We're achievers in the world. And it's about the world recognising us as that. But it's also about Australia saying, hold on, we have the oldest living culture in the world here: look at the contributions they've made."

Frankland points to prominent Aborigines such as inventor David Unaipon, and the poets, artists, politicians and sportspeople who have contributed to society.

"Some of the greatest patriots in this country are people who try and reconcile the cultural abyss that exists between black and white.

"And I like the fact that I've contributed to this country. I like being a contributor as opposed to a problem."

Conversations with the Dead opens at Belvoir Street Theatre on Wednesday.